MAXUS MAKES ITS MOVE is inevitable, Kennedy argued, and is less damaging to the rain forest than mining, lumbering, or cattle ranching; Conoco could have been influenced by environ- mentalists, because it is vulnerable to public pressure, whereas a small, inde- pendent company like Maxus is not. Kennedy shrugs off the charge that his RIo N apo Foundation was a sellout of the Huaorani, and that it was stopped, in the end, not so much by American environ- mentalists as by the Huaorani them- selves. He's still mystified by the situation he faced. "I have no idea what happened, or what the internal"-that is, Indian- "politics were," he told me. "There's al- most an anthropological question of whether they have the capacity to negoti- ate." The Oriente's Indians, he said, "are essentially inept at government." It would be easy to dismiss Kennedy's arguments as disingenuous (he must know, for example, that oil development leads directly to mining, farming, and ranching, and that, even if environmen- talists had been able to influence Conoco, there would have been no control over other oil companies, like Petroecuador, that would piggyback on the Conoco in- frastructure), or as sour grapes, or as inex- penence (after all, he spent only a short time in the Oriente). But that would miss the point. The point is that many of the people involved with environmental and human-rights work in the Oriente have succumbed to the same seductive logic as Kennedy and Jacob Scherr, because sit- ting in a corporate office negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal is far headier, and far more comfortable, than sleeping In the mud. Almost none of the groups that have taken up the cause of the Huaorani, or their land, have a relation- ship with the Huaorani that is any- thing more than tangential, and, frankly, it's hard to fault them. Working with the Huaorani is a high-risk, low-reward proposition: travel to the territory is ex- pensive, dangerous, and time-consuming (and, often, illegal); communication is nearly impossible; the cultural gulf is enormous; the Company is all-powerful; and the Huaorani themselves are utterly unpredIctable. Still, there are signs that the struggle isn't over. Judith Kimerling has filed a suit against Texaco. The fragile alliance between Ecuador's urban environmen- talists and Amazonian Indians, which Kennedy and Scherr helped blow apart, has coalesced again around Kimerling's work, and around the rapidly escalating scale of oil disasters. (Last year, a spill filled the N apo with a slick that stretched from bank to bank for forty miles. "It looks much worse than it is," a Petro- ecuador official said. "The water under- neath is perfectly fine.") A movement has begun here to persuade Congress to open hearings on the activities of American oil companIes in the Oriente. The feeling seems to be that the only way to get the Company ever to clean up its act is to give it reason to fear that somewhere down the road it will have to pay for the damage it has done. Meanwhile, the Company presses on. In my mind, and in the minds of many others, there is no question that the behavior of American oil compa- nies in the Amazon would invite pros- ecution if they acted that way at home. But ifblame is to be assigned, one must also point, strongly, to the Ecuadorian government; and, unfortunately, to en- vironmentalists; and to the Oriente's indigenous leaders themselves. And one must consider this: Like almost all the oil in the Oriente, the oil beneath the Huaorani homeland is destined for the United States. Americans-you c <> >t . ' ') ,.1 . ..... C" IV '- \ " 79 and I-must look to themselves and ask: Are we willing to have innocent people destroyed to save a few cents on a gallon of gas? Change is inevitable for the Huaorani, but it is in our power to allow them the time-and space-to develop their own cultural tools for dealing with that change. If, for the sake of thirteen days of oil, the Huaorani disappear, then are we not their killers? O N Columbus Day of last year, twenty thousand Indians, from all comers of Ecuador, descended on QIito to stage a mass protest. About half of them made it through a cordon of mili- tary barriers erected around the city. In a driving rain, they gathered in the central plaza to hear Valerio Grefa rail against five hundred years of oppression by the Spanish conquerors. He punctuated his speech with thrusts of a Huao spear. It was a tourist spear, from a trinket shop, and it was maybe half the size of a real spear. But the Huaorani didn't mind. They didn't even know. They hadn't come to QIito, and they hadn't joined the protest. As they see it, they have never been conquered, because they are the bravest people in the Amawn. . f " :c.- . 'Thank you so much jòr inviting me to playa pivotal role in your marriage. What am I to do, exactly?"